WAR and AoC to Invade the Korean Market

Fri, Nov 14, 2008

If baseball and movies are America’s national pastimes, then MMOs and StarCraft are Korea’s. Hell, MMOs are such a big part of Korean pop culture that the Korean government funded and opened an English website dedicated to getting American (and other English speaking) gamers to play their Korean products.

So it should come as no shock that the two biggest recent MMOs in the US are making their way to Korea’s shores, as both Warhammer Online and Age of Conan have secured Korean publishers. Fittingly, Warhammer Online will be published by Korea’s version of EA, Hangame, while AoC will be published by the Eidos of Korea, Neowiz Games.

The question now, is will these two games succeed in Korea like they did elsewhere?

While Korea does love its MMOs, a vast majority of gamers prefer the free-to-play plus optional premium content model, not the pay-per-month one we all know and love. Korean mega-publishers also have many more MMOs already established on the market to compete with the high-costing WAR and AoC, whereas in the US the only real competition either faced was World of Warcraft.

The lack of a grind and solid, reliable endgame for both is also going to prove problematic for many Korean players. Westerners hate grinding in an MMO (unless it’s WoW…), but in Korea grinding is a large part of what makes their original online games unique. I don’t know if it’s the sense of accomplishment in working harder than others to get better equipment or if it’s the virtual hard work translating into real money much easier than it is here, but it’s a staple of the highly-played Korean MMOs, and something both WAR and AoC tried desperately to avoid.

For those who do pick up the games, I certainly hope they manage to get some steam behind them – especially WAR. As someone who regretfully chose a less populated server at launch, it’s an incredibly boring and wasteful experience to play WAR when your server is barren.

One thing’s for certain: offering an official release in Korea is only going to increase the number of gold sellers failing to break into the WAR world. With over 13,000 gold seller accounts already banned according to Mythic’s Banhammer counter, it’s obvious that the gold selling community doesn’t quite understand how pointless gold in WAR is compared to games like WoW, since Mythic followed the advice of many and created an in-game economy in which gold plays little role. So at the very least, EA will make buckets of cash selling new accounts to the banned gold selling crowd. As for AoC, we’ll just have to hope their Korean launch goes smoother than the American one.